At the start of 2016, the latest social media meme was Be Like Bill, the straight talking (but probably a little too pushy) stickman who offered advice on anything from social media etiquette to relationship troubles.
And now Facebook users can create their very own ‘Be Like Bill’ meme after a software company called BloBla (at www.blobla.com / en.blobla.com) has capitalised on the craze and allows users to enter their own name (and gender) onto a webpage to generate their own version of the meme.
And it went viral.
This inevitably has led us to deal with plenty of questions from users emailing the site to whether or not it’s safe. So as usual we’ve compiled our usual “is it safe?” FAQs for you to digest.
The generator – at the time of writing – doesn’t use any kind of Facebook app or downloadable software to generate its results. It simply asks for your first name and gender and then uses that information to create an arbitrary and random meme with your name on it. Of course, as many have probably realised, the result isn’t specific to you, and entering the same name more than one generates different memes.
Given that you don’t need to install anything and the information you give it isn’t particularly personal then it doesn’t appear to be dangerous to use it.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
The information we could find about BloBla is limited. It is a site that appears to be operating out of Asia, but they have chosen to make their details associated with their domain private. Whilst the ‘Be Like Bill’ meme generator doesn’t require an app to use, many of the features on the site do require you to install the BloBla app that does ask for certain information about your Facebook account, including your email address, timeline posts and friends list.
You can remove permissions but the app may not work without them.
Whilst we see no reason for the app to ask for your email address, we suspect many of the different features offered by BloBla would not work if you did not allow access to your friends list or timeline posts.
Many (if not all) of the apps on offer at BloBla are quite trashy (“Who is you best friend?“, “What does Obama say about you” etc.)We generally do not advise our readers to install trashy or silly apps because it means you’re unnecessarily giving away your personal information to a software company that you know very little about.
But trashy does not always equate to scammy. To their credit, BloBla do have a privacy policy that in part states –
Your information you provide to us is used only to generate the results for the games you play or the quizzes you take. We do not store your information on our server, nor we provide it to 3rd parties.
Of course, like with any privacy policy, it may mean little if you don’t trust the company to stick to their word. If you’re planning on installing apps from the BloBla website, as with any other company, you have to ask yourself whether you trust the app developer enough to install these types of “procrastinating” and ultimately pointless apps that will have access to certain information about you.
You can read our full article on the potential dangers and problems you could face when installing “fun and entertaining” apps in our article here.
